Biking with a Bump

Hey, how about that for radio silence?

Here's a picture of Alex going grocery shopping on the Mundo to make up for it:

Yes, I had to cut down on the posting. Sadly it's a reflection of the fact that, starting in October, I had to cut down on the biking as well. You see, in astonishing conformity to our plans, my husband and I actually conceived a second child on exactly the schedule we'd hoped for--one due to arrive just a few months after the third birthday of our son, Alex. Given how mutable--and risible!--plans usually are in our house, I don't know how we managed to do it.(1)

The element that we only half-incorporated into our plans was that this pregnancy would be just as physically challenging for me as the last one. I had such a difficult time eating and retaining food that I lost weight two months in a row. I was so tired I could barely do my job. The bulk of my household chores now belong my long-suffering husband.

Given my nausea, exhaustion and overall malaise, biking was out of the question for me the first three months of pregnancy. After the first trimester ended and I moved into what is called the "golden period" of pregnancy--the second trimester, when supposedly the early side effects go away but the fetus is not yet large enough to put a huge physical toll on your body--I found my condition improved... marginally. I attempted a couple of too-ambitious bike rides with Alex that left me ill for up to a week afterwards as I wasn't able to eat enough food to replace the calories I burned by biking.

Now, at the end of my second trimester, I have finally reached that happy plateau that most other pregnant women get to around week 14. I can go on short, easy bike rides with Alex one or two days a week without worrying that I'll pay a price for days afterwards. With Washington DC poised to enter its glorious spring season, I'm ready to get out of the house and explore the city again with my favorite passenger.

Some people ask about biking while pregnant, and I guess this is what I'd say:

There's nothing inherent in pregnancy that means you can't ride a bike. But every woman is different and every pregnancy is different. While I don't think we should discourage pregnant women from riding bikes, I also don't think it's right to push women to ride bikes while pregnant if--for whatever reason--they aren't comfortable doing so. I've heard stories of women biking themselves to their birth centers in labor; I've heard stories of women quitting at six months of pregnancy because of diminished lung capacity or the discomfort of their knees knocking into their bellies. And of course, there are women like me. Whatever our commitment to biking prior to pregnancy, some of us end up with the short end of the gestational stick and find even the littlest physical effort of bicycling too much on top of everything else that's happening to our bodies. And that's fine. I can't say it enough: every woman is different. Every pregnancy is different.


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1. Well, yes, I do know. But I'm not sharing it with you. ;-)

April 4 & 5: Things they don't mention in Womens' Biking Forums

See that plastic duck? Alex has four of them. He got them as a birthday present over the weekend. He loves them, and everywhere he goes, they have to go with him. All four of them. You could get a lot of entertainment out of watching me attempt to descend four flights of steps with Alex, a laptop bag, my purse, an Elmo backpack, AND four plastic ducks every morning. Oh, and I'm carrying Alex too, as he can't do steps in his boots.

But before we even get to that point, we have to make it out the apartment's front door. On most work days, walking out the door with Alex is the single hardest thing I have to do all day. Half the time it involves carrying him, literally kicking and screaming, away from my husband, the dog, the cat, his toys, or whatever book he's suddenly decided he HAS to read. Another quarter of the time, there's a last-minute replacement of some soiled clothing item (fellow parents, YOU know what I mean) that adds more expensive minutes to our morning routine.

All this is to say that, for me as a "cycling woman" (whatever that means), one of the primary obstacles to riding my bike for transport isn't fear of cars, concerns about helmet hair, reluctance to break a sweat, or lack of experience: it's time.

When I use the car to drop Alex off at daycare and go to work, it's forty-five minutes for the full one-way trip. When I bike to daycare and take Metro to work, it's an hour and a half. And if I'm having one of those ambitious days where I decide to bike the full 8.5 mile trip to work? My commute starts nudging toward the two-hour mark. That's one way.

Now, obviously I love bike commuting. It helps me focus at work, it saves money and repairs on our ancient gas-guzzler, and with Alex along it's just crazy stupid fun. I think it even makes the drivers who share the road with us a little happier, seeing a mom and her kid on their big orange bike, having the time of their lives picking curbside dandelions and meowing at imaginary cats.

But I can't escape the fact that choosing the bike over the car sucks an extra 1.5 hours out of my day. As hard as I try to set a morning routine that lets us leave early enough, there are so many days when the routine goes to hell and it feels like a full day's labor just to get out the door with Alex fully clothed (even counting matched socks as optional). Every single week, I have one or two days when I have to change my transportation mode from bike to car when it becomes clear that doing otherwise would make me unacceptably late for work. And every time that happens, I feel like I've failed.

Then I go to forum after forum and listen to people asking questions about why more women aren't out on bikes, and I hear all the answers about clothing and hair and infrastructure and fear and clueless bike shops... and I think about how those would have been my answers, too, five years ago. But these days it mostly comes down to time.

Elly Blue and Marla Streb are my heroes when it comes to advocating for women's cycling: Elly because she crunched the numbers in a seminal article in Grist Magazine to point out that there are lots of reasons women stay off bikes besides "It's scary and I won't look as pretty!!1!"; Marla, because she (alone) spoke up for mothers at the recent National Women's Cycling Forum, quotably proclaiming that the fact that "Kids are an equipment sport" is an additional challenge for women who bike.

I think the bike advocacy community needs to ask itself what their newly-recruited cycling women are supposed to do in five or so years, when they start becoming mothers.

a.m. temperature: (April 4) 55
a.m. temperature: (April 5) 48

Alex wore (both days): Bogs boots, light cotton pants, short-sleeve shirt, heavy cotton sweater (so Nordic! So tweedy!), winter helmet. For the trip home, we left off the sweater and switched the boots to his regular shoes.

Clothing notes: PERFECT on 4/4. Seriously, a home run clothing-wise, both trips. A little underdressed on 4/5: Coldhands struck again, and I had to spend most of my ride warming his fingers up with my spare hand. Didn't know it was THAT cold when I was choosing his clothes! Maybe there are tiny, thin gloves somewhere that will keep his hands warm and let him ding the bike bells.